To me, it's reducible to the equivalent of a seller saying "I will sell you the answer to 1 + 2." That seems inherently worthless.
It's only worthwhile if rich idiots are trading these mathematical answers around like baseball cards. But then, I don't see how they can "own" them if they or anyone can just make infinite copies of them when/if they ever have access to the "private key" material.
Ownership of the underlying digital asset doesn't make sense either. Again, there don't seem to be obvious legal or technical protections to stop anyone from making copies.
Yup. Effectively, printing their own currency of large denominations and trading in real money for them. Which then reduces to people stuffing real money into ever smaller suitcases for exfil and cleaning, regardless if they're new shiny thing dabblers, corporate pirates, actual pirates, or drug dealers.
Furthermore, there are numerous problems with digital archival that need to be addressed.
Some pages have complicated backend dependencies (APIs, tokens, dynamic content) that make naive mirroring effectively useless for preservation. Example would be some of the old versions of patches and KB articles from the Microsoft Windows support site when it wasn't as simple as visiting a plain webpage but redirection to dynamic content. Downloads often required an extra redirection to a mirror or some sort of analytics check-in to get a concrete (one-time token authorized too?) link.
Does digital archival require a right to be forgotten?
Media players, converters, and complete documentation about formats need to be preserved in order for media to be useful indefinitely.
How about describing the encoding of plain text documents so that that's preserved too?
Capturing as much metadata as reasonably possible so that it can be useful for future users and researchers.